Posted
by
Hemos
on Tuesday March 06, 2007 @08:40AM
from the everything-old-is-new-again dept.

JamesO writes "Commodore is a name which will bring memories flooding back to many a gamer and it's been announced that the legendary brand is to return with a new range of high specification gaming PCs.
The new Commodore PCs optimized for gaming will be launched at the CeBIT show in Germany on March 15 and attendees will be offered the chance to play the latest PC games using the purpose-built PCs."

I can recall the days when I would make a few mod's to my system, and run a remote control airplane from my c-64. I think it was the best documented hardware ever. I had so much fun with it that it lead me to become a became a radio shack regular.

The original C=64 could output to a TV, and most games for the platform anticipated this. They also were optimized for joystick or joystick+partial keyboard control. But unfortunately, few games for Windows anticipate reading input from two USB gamepads and displaying output on a standard-definition TV. Does Commodore plan to revive the development of TV-friendly computer games?

I suppose I can see why geeks would be more likely to prefer that brandnames were used on technical similarities rather than for reasons of marketing. Although then again, no one seems to care about reusing the Macintosh brand for different operating systems, or reusing brandnames like "Playstation" for completely different consoles - for some reason it only seems to be the Commodore (and perhaps also Amiga) brands which people complain about here.

Still, some brand names remain a bit constant. If you happened to be hanging around Apple headquarters, you might bump into Steve Jobs or Woz. The current Apple grew directly from the guys who were building the IIc in the 1980s. You could conceivably still find Shigeru Miyamoto running around the Nintendo offices, and you'd know that you're at the birthplace of the NES you were so glued to way back when. Hate Microsoft all you like, but you can still point to Gates and Ballmer and know that these are a couple of the guys responsible for that ubiquitous MS-DOS stuff you used to play with.

Brand loyalty can be a funny and superficial thing, and I'm not usually a practitioner of it myself, but I still prefer to see it used by those who earned it rather than third parties who scoop up names that others built. As another commenter on this story wrote, it feels pretty much like the retail version of domain squatting.

- returns to making computers that boots in one second -
- creates an OS that has programming languages built-in and ready to go -
- designs a machine that will fit in a backpack -
- invents a clock that keeps time without power -
- does something revolutionary -

that's when I'll buy another Commodore. I'll be damned if I let a group of people manipulate my nostalgia to sell me something as common as air.

I have a Commodore PC at home. It's just a standard 486 beige box[1] with a Commodore label on. I bought it second hand and used it as a firewall.
When one of my friends saw the label, he assumed it was some kind of joke. I had to explain that Commodore sold PCs before they went down.

At least that was made (or at least sold) by the "real" Commodore, though, despite the company's crapness. "Commodore Gaming" are just a bunch of unrelated guys that bought the name... so what?

As another poster said, buy an old name, slap it on any old equipment; Commodore's brands have been exploited this way before [theregister.co.uk]. Things is, these tactics seem to get some attention from the press. Does the "new" Napster have any more relation to the original service (or its owners) than any other legal download service? No; but the press hyped up its "rebirth" as if it did. Or perhaps it was just an excuse to write some articles about the download market; whatever. At least new Napster was doing sort of the same thing as the original company.

Personally, I don't mind Infogrames using the Atari name, because the original company is long dead (and was latterly crap). What pisses me off is that- for no reason I can see other than a third-rate designer justifying his salary (FOAD)- they mucked about with the original "Fuji" logo. Yeah, I know, they just changed the middle bar; but the original's brilliance *was* that it was so simple, yet well-designed.